REYHANLI, Turkey — Western-backed “moderate” rebels fighting jihadists in Syria are refusing to do battle and even defecting for lack of weapons and other promised support, leaders said.

Despite President Barack ‘s strategy, outlined last month, to arm and fund rebels to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) and the Assad regime, arms supplies remained at a trickle, they said.

Even when they received weapons heavier than rifles, they came encumbered with bureaucracy.

“We decide on the mission that we want to do. Then we apply to the operations room for the weapons. If they agree with our military plan, some weapons arrive,” said a commander with the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed.

“If we receive Tow anti-tank missiles, we have to film every time we use one to prove that we haven’t sold it on.”

The conditions are imposed because of America’s long-standing fear that weapons provided to the “moderate” rebels will end up in the hands of jihadists.

The recent experience of moderate rebels suggests this policy is backfiring. Two of the most important American-backed groups were attacked and overrun earlier this month by Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, a defeat they put down to their lack of international support.

It was reported that Jabhat al-Nusra was able to capture weapons originally supplied by the West and its allies.

AP Photo/Raqqa Media Center, File

In his speech outlining his response to the threat of ISIS in September, Mr Obama promised a “moderate” rebel force would be built up from scratch, starting with training 5,000 men. However, officials said this would take at least a year, and that Mr. Obama’s first targets were the jihadists.

The U.S. then bombed Jabhat al-Nusra as well as ISIS, even though the group had been fighting alongside the “moderate” rebels. In response, Jabhat turned against the western-backed fighters.

Abu Ahmed said he called for support from his Western backers in vain. “Some of the other Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups didn’t come to help, because they feared that Jabhat al-Nusra would then turn against them too,” he added.

Jabhat al-Nusra defeated a unit of one group, Harakat al-Hazm, and took large areas of Idlib province from the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, a major group led by the well-known rebel Jamal Maarouf.

Earlier this year, the Syrian opposition in exile and its British and American advisers made a concerted push to promote Mr. Maarouf as a rebel “with whom the West could work,” despite a reputation for war profiteering.

Abu Majid, another rebel leader, who has been receiving western support for six months, said it had not prevented his recent defeat by Jabhat al-Nusra and that he was losing faith. More than 1,000 men, half his brigade’s strength, had left in despair, many defecting to ISIS.

Defection to the jihadists has been going on for years. Mahmoud, a former prisoner of the Syrian regime who used to work for the FSA, now runs safe houses in Turkey for foreign fighters looking to join Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS.

He said he wasn’t an extremist, just practical. “Many of my friends are doing the same now,” he said.

“[ISIS] is the only solution for us. If Obama had given support to the FSA things would have been different.”